I was at work, designing websites for some friends of mine, when you decided to call me. There didnt seem to be any real purpose to your call, except to maybe check in on me to find out whether or not I was behaving myself. You spoke of your mundane life and about how much you disliked your job. They have been making you cover your sick associates schedules because of their lack of techs on the job. You seemed to have such disdain for your current employment situation. I asked you if you planned on staying with your current employer and you told me You dont know me at all. Of course I wont. Ill burn out in six months and quit this job like I always do. I wanted to tell you how I had no job prospects in Los Angeles and how jealous I was that you had a stable source of income. I dont understand how you could want to ruin such a good employment situation  especially if you are paying such high rent for our old apartment. I wish I had the knowledge you had in terms of being a vet tech. Your job is an awesome opportunity to make a decent living, while earning desirable wages. However, I bit my tongue, as I have frequently in the past, and didnt delve into a counter argument. I feel as if I have to conceal parts of my thoughts in order to sustain a friendly nature to our relationship. But by hiding my thoughts, I am repressing a part of my being that I find to be one of my best features  my wit and immediate comprehension of the surrounding elements of situations. This overt and covert repression negates a part of me that you once immensely loved. We can never go back to our long lost love if I continue to repress my coherence. The good part about this is that you never want to return to the warm loving understanding we once shared, and so you most likely enjoy my vocal repression because it allows you to dominate the dynamics of our current communication. You enjoy having power over your past lovers; I fear that I am allowing you this space to exist within your own enjoyment. Fuck! I guess you can consider me a carnival ride, ready for you to get on and be happy, while my mechanics are breaking down with each and every fare. I hope that someday you will tire of my ride, and will abandon me like how most amusement parks that go out of business. I wish I werent as nice a person as I truly am. I wish I could be an evildoer like some men I come across in my life. If only I could be snobbish and uncivil, discourteous and insolent to you, then you wouldnt feel the need to call me, expecting me to respect you. Oh how I wish my mother never taught me manners; at least then I could feel retribution for the pain and suffering you have caused me. You truly are blind to the torment our break-up has put me through. Im not moving because my friends are in Los Angeles, Im moving because Id kill myself if I had to stay in the same city as you. Ive come to terms with my own self-destruction and in a dramatic maneuver I am trying to propagate my own survival. But these are things I can never tell you in our conversations. I doubt youd listen to my cries anyway.

Dear bitch, Ive made it to Los Angeles! The Phoenix is reborn! But do you care about my reincarnation? Fuck no you dont, you selfish person. Tonight, after my arrival into this vortex of a town, I once again viewed your Myspace account. Low and behold, to my disapproval and contempt, you had posted a photo of yourself with a bright and shinny hickey on your neck. Let me first tell you how disgusted I am by your public display of your scandalous engagements. Why the fuck must you publicize your fallen physical repercussions? Do you find it sexy to narcissistically view your image of shame? Does it please your senses to use the internet as a mirror for your scandals? Why must you embellish your sex life with such vivid documentation? Well, in response to your actions, I can respond to you with a whole-hearted Fuck off! Let me tell you how the last hour of my car ride to Los Angeles went: I couldnt read the exit signs because my eyes were burning from the swelling of tears. I cried for an hour straight; and let me tell you, its no easy task to cry while driving a car full of boxes  boxes which represent the turmoil my life is in at this present moment. All I could think about was my own defeat, represented by the loss of your love. However, I felt good emotions towards you, even though I could only criticize my own impotent actions towards our situation. I felt like a looser, someone who doesnt deserve any more chances at neither happiness nor success in life. On several occasions my muscles flinched, contracting my hands, which made me swerve my car. I almost died because of the self-loathing that I could not surpass during that last hour of my drive Once I finally reached my destination, I came to the conclusion that things were going to get better, and that you and I were not a failure, yet an ever-progressing germination of the process of our love and understanding  the good times and the horrible times are part of the whole which constitutes our essence. Except I now have a new understanding of our essence, post-hickey photo: you are a hateful person and a fallen woman who doesnt have the decency to be monogamist, or to seve me with divorce papers before you go and make out (or make-love) to other people. Again, my rage and hate for your being has swelled and I can only think about how much I loath your existence. On the other side of all this, I am now currently 400 miles away from you and no longer have to be in your physical presence. The streets out front are not the streets of San Francisco, which I would be wandering right now if I were there. Instead, I have good friends around me and therefore I am going to work through this rage in a healthy manner. Furthermore, Id like to remind you of your lascivious yet fallen ways, by continuing to write to you as I have in the past.

Two days after our wedding, you and I went to downtown San Francisco to wander the streets of this fresh and exotic new city while waiting for our friend Mike to finish selling his art on the streets. It was the day before Christmas and the streets were packed with last minute shoppers, desperate to find their ultimate gift for the holiday. Wandering westward from the Powell Bart station we found ourselves at the Yerba Buena Gardens, which happen to be sponsored by Sony Incorporated. Its funny to think about grass and water having a corporate sponsor, but these things happen all the time in our consumer based capitalist society. Nonetheless, the park itself was lovely, yet only sub par compared to you. We played by the fountains, daring each other to jump into the running water. However the weather was brisk and we both knew that any fool stupid enough to venture into the water would suffer from the freezing elements which Mother Nature had no qualms dispensing her wrath. And even though neither you nor I was foolish enough to jump in, we were fools in Love. Furthermore, we didnt care about natures consequences to our amorous wanderings. Our first test in trust was soon to be upon us, as we neared closer and closer to the freezing fountains. With your hands firmly grasping my hands, you leaned over the cement edge from where we were standing, tempting gravity and Mother Nature with your beauty. I held on as long as I possibly could, but my grasp was neither strong enough nor long enough to withstand the unforeseeable imminent future. Our hands briefly grabbed for one another in mid-fall, but our futile attempts were unrewarded by the bitter cold of the fountains revenge. With the wind picking up, our bodies quaked as the water surrounding us lowered our bodies temperature from steamy hot passion to holy fuck Im freezing. We laughed as long as we could before the reality of the situation sank into our thoughts. Since neither of us had a change of clothes, we were destined to bear the wrath of our water-soaked ways. And so it was, we were two lovers drenched in a fountain, and it was lovely. Five months passed working at the Academy of Art, I often spend my lunch break frequenting the same Yerba Buena Gardens in which we had our first lesson in trust. However, when I now sit next to the fountains which we once threw ourselves into, I ponder a long lost feeling that I no longer experience; you are that feeling which plagues my lunch hour. In contrast to our once foolish yet happy ways, I now feel somehow sadly wiser than I did during those lustful and romantic moments of our history. For me, wisdom has been brought about through a curiously painful process of loosing you, my love, like the loss of your trust I once gambled with on that fateful Christmas Eve day. Yet I have gained something quite peculiar in return  the ability to metaphysically perceive our historical love as something we had no control over. We were at the mercy of gravity and nature, as we have always been. And yet, the fountains themselves are also controlled and manipulated by the external forces of physics that govern the tangential outcomes of the present moment. If the moment were represented by a math equation, the future is the equals, the moment is variable, and the past is the problem.

In our previous conversation, I questioned whether or not I would see the security deposit for our old apartment safely returned to my bank account. Your response was quick, saying Maybe, if you stop squirting my friends with squirt guns. To this, I countered your request with a bowed head and a devious smile. And even though I have no plans to blast your friends with my water guns, the thought of spraying all your friends whom I loathed brought pleasure to my mind. You then told me that if I had squirted your ex-fiancé Justin at his work, he would have jumped over the counter and kicked my ass. HA! That piece of shit dweeb you call a lover? He couldnt get near enough to my ass to pat it, let alone destroy it. If he ever tried to be violent or physical with me, Id destroy every living essence in his self-loathing body. This wisp of a man you call your best friend has been an enemy of mine ever since he and I met each other in San Jose. Our first introductions were quaint, yet developed underlying tones of jealousy and aggression: his words to you when he found out about our marriage was Ill help you sign the divorce papers. Fuck him for such terrible benedictions. After you and I separated, he was the first person you fucked. Fuck you for that. And now, the man-child feels the need to affirm his manliness by convincing you of his reactive predictions toward me squirting him with a squirt gun. And worse, you believe in his power over me. I suppose this shows how powerless you are in Justins disturbingly grotesque web. Justin is a hack of a human, designed to pity himself for eternity, and you give him the pity he cries for. Why? Doesnt his disgusting abhorrence get old after awhile? The only credit I will give the boy is that he is a talented musician. But besides his musical talents, he has nothing going for him. His wit is acute, but only wrestles with its own self-loathing to ever amount to genius. His physical features remind me of a twig with spectacles, and his prospects for a progressive future are shallow and vain. The man is a callow individual that I would never want as a friend. Theres a lot to say about a person by definition through the caliber of his enemies. Therefore, Id be doing myself a favor not to hold this grudge towards such a lousy opponent. It is undignified to hate one who has no dignity. However, let me state this as clearly as possible: if Justin ever tried to lay a finger on me, he would experience a pain so unholy, hell have to have an exorcism performed on his remains just so he could have a proper Catholic burial. Sometimes I wish for such an opportunity to unleash my demons into this physical world through physical violence. However, I usually find other avenues to fulfill these evil thoughts into physical fruitions. So, if you would dear wife, let your best friend know that if he were to reach over the counter to countervail my squirt, he would regret his ever meeting me so many months ago. I thank you for relaying this honest message.
-me

(p.s. in retrospect to re-reading this letter, I do not wish any harm to you or your friend. this letter was an outlet for my anger at the time when I wrote it.)

When I last spoke to you three days ago, I asked whether or not you despised me at this point  not because I truly believed you loathed me, but because I wanted to exaggerate my assumption of your feelings so that you would counter my question with a thoughtful response. Even if you didnt despise me, you would at least consider a despicable feeling towards me, thus allowing yourself to question your own feelings, and respond with a dialectical answer. Your response to my question was No, I dont despise you, but Im pissed off at you. I found this statement interesting because it gave no outlook onto future feelings you will eventually have for me. If you were to say Im pissed off at you right now, then I could have interpreted the sentence as having a time reference. Its important for me to consider the intricate details of our conversations, otherwise our interactions would be lost in the void of ambiguity. I need to concern myself with the understanding as to know exactly where we are in terms of our post-love connection. Since I am leaving the city in four days, I want to be as clear as possible concerning what it is I am leaving behind. If I were to go to Los Angeles thinking I was leaving a possibility of us re-united at some distant point in the future, my current decisions about my moving would be altered because I would thusly be considering vague possibilities of our current situation. Geography is a major factor in any relationship, or non-relationship, because it is the space in which a relationship conceals itself in time. The process of giving and concealing is determined by the space in which the relationship can grow or dissipate through time. When we say through time, we position ourselves as a vessel that is, though concurrently is not moving through a non-existent dichotomy of points  that is, from A to B there is a passage through space which has given itself to time, which is to say the space has continued to presence itself in the now. And so, geography is the space in which bodies exist, in relation to other bodies in space. The latitude and longitude, which defines our physical location, allows humans to mathematically experience similar environmental establishments. But more importantly than just observing the environment in our present location, is connecting and communicating with other sentient beings in your direct vicinity. Furthermore, the physical presence of a being presenting itself in the present, at a location in proximity to ones own presenting, allows the time and space desired to make connections; which we term relationships. Now, to get back to your statement of Im pissed off at you, which is in the present tense, which gives no indication of future prospects, or past histories, I can surely state that geographically placing myself away from your present presence will undoubtedly give my being a chance to conceal my life from you, therefore allowing you the time to develop a future prospect of your present feelings, thus turning your present tense statement into a past tense statement, again allowing a thoughtful dialectical processing of your emotions towards me, germinating a response which will give hopes to a history, present and future relationship between you and I  or maybe to give hopes of a decisive concealment of our anger and emotions?
-The processor

99 Letters is the documented process of the visceral and emotional experience I had during my divorce. Writing these letters was an attempt to articulate my thoughts artistically and creatively. Read these memoirs as you would read a fictitious book. Syndicate entries using RSS and Comments (RSS).